Faces of Glenfinnan

Tucked away among some of the roughest and toughest mountains of Western Scotland, and at the head of a ridiculously picturesque pencil-thin loch, lies the tiny community of Glenfinnan. Boasting two hotels, a railway station with several trains daily, and an old rail carriage converted into a hostel, Glenfinnan still manages to exude an air of rare calm, keenly felt as you stroll towards the loch through the higgledy-piggledy of houses half-hidden among the luxuriance of rhododendron bushes and assorted other green things.

Glenfinnan has made its mark on the more popular consciousness for two distinct reasons. Firstly, its curious viaduct, straddling the entrance to Glenfinnan proper, has found fame for its appearance in one of the Harry Potter films. Secondly, it is the place where Charles Edward Stuart, better known as Bonnie Prince Charlie, first hit the Scottish mainland and, on August 19th 1745, raised his standard to claim for himself the British throne. A bunch of Highlanders enthusiastically joined him on his ill-fated venture, which came to an abrupt end at Culloden, just outside Inverness, in October 1746 when, to put it bluntly, his followers were beaten to a pulp by the government forces led by the Duke of Cumberland.

There followed particularly grisly times for the folk of Highland Scotland. Firstly, Cumberland and his buddies set out on a quest of bloody reprisals against these nuisance Highlanders that was tantamount to genocide. Efforts to completely eradicate the Highland culture were followed by the notorious Clearances, when large numbers of folk were thrown off the land, either shipped to North America or to starve, to be replaced by sheep.

While the story of Bonnie Prince Charlie is less clear-cut than some would like us to believe - he was from France, not Scotland, and a good number of Scots fought on the side of the British government and 'Butcher' Cumberland - he has nevertheless passed into folklore as an icon of Scottish freedom. Calls for the independence of proud Scots from those conquering English b*****ds down south still ring loud these days, thanks in part to the successful political antics of Alex Salmond and his Nationalist cronies. Yet I find these cries increasingly hollow. This may be partly because what I consider 'quintessentially Scottish' is a far cry from Mr Salmond and his devotees' notion. And with all this polemic about greater independence and self-determination, I find it deeply ironic that the latest wave of invaders has actually been welcomed with open arms. I refer to the multinational corporations who have come, seen, and conquered with their army of windfarms. 'Come. Rape, plunder, destroy our beautiful landscape. You have our blessing' is the attitude to money-grabbing entrepreneurs often based hundreds of miles from Scottish shores.

There is Scotland. And there is Highland Scotland. To the sharp suits strutting their stuff round the buildings of Holyrood, life among the hills and on the edge of sea lochs is a world away. From the viewpoint of the urban power base Highland life is, I feel, second class, eked out by people on the periphery. People who don't really count. Not very much.

In stark contrast to the royal treatment meted out to the new conquistadors is the dismissive approach to small communities that are unfortunate enough to be located near to a new windfarm proposal. A 'consultation process' takes place, a sop to democratic process. A closer look at what actually happens shows this 'consultation' to be similar to that which might be afforded to somebody on Death Row, asking them whether they prefer pork or lamb for their final dinner before the electric chair. The recent passing of the Corriemoillie windfarm proposal (see the link from this blog) is a typical example, where the Highland Council majority rides roughshod over the hearts and souls of many of the local inhabitants, going against its own previous rulings and recommendations as to locations suitable for gangs of turbines, to satisfy their own unspoken agenda. The cynical and heartless dismissal of local voices echoes the treatment dished out to Highlanders by Cumberland the Butcher some 250 years ago. OK, it doesn't involve rape and murder on a literal level, but it does destroy a considerable part of a way of living, and of what is dearly cherished, by many people living in the rural Highlands.

I once attended a meeting about windfarms, organised in Inverness by the Wilderness Foundation (incidentally, not one of the 30-odd members of Highland Council who were invited bothered to turn up). A man in a suit gave an excellent presentation on why upland windfarms are a waste of money, and how the sacrifice of countryside is far too high a price to pay. Then another man in a suit gave a rather defensive presentation about why harnessing the wind in the hills is so important. There followed questions and answers, generally pretty learned queries from pretty learned people. Then a man got up and started to speak. He was barely coherent, and looked on the edge of a mental breakdown. He lived in a village nearby, it transpired, had lived there all his life. Now some turbines had appeared near his house and where he walked the dog, and he didn't know what to do. His emotional outpouring had everybody feeling decidedly twitchy. It cut right through the graphs and statistics. It is people's lives we are talking about here; and no-one had the heart to tell him there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.....

This all poses a riddle to me. How can people with such a strong complex about being invaded - of having their own freedom denied them - so easily become so beastly in turn - even to those who are apparently of their own kind (fellow Scots)? Yet this is precisely what is being dished out to local communities by Highland Council, by Alex Salmond and his neo-conquistadors, and undoubtedly by others.

Is it possible that some light can be shed upon this most strange state of affairs by considering the phenomenon of 'abuse bonding', or the 'victim-perpetrator bond', as John Lash calls it? Certainly, other avenues of research fail to explain a thing about the situation. 'Abuse bonding', as applied by some modern psychologists to dysfunctional family situations and addictive relationships, observes how the abused so often becomes, in time, an abuser. Catherine Keller, quoted in Chapter One of 'Not In his Image', remarks how, in dominator cultures, violence arises ' in situations where abuse communicates itself from one generation to the next. Over and over again, we see the causing of pain - destructiveness and abuse - flow out of a prior wounding.'

Abused and abuser exist in a kind of perverted collusion, and the abused so often turns abuser. John Lash extends the analysis of this dynamic into social, cultural, and religious contexts, and we can do the same here, thus bringing light to bear on the goings-on already alluded to in Scotland. The initial instinct is to imagine that those who have visualised themselves for so long as victims will, once freed from that role, be kind, generous, and caring to others. Not a bit of it. The abused becomes the abuser; victim turns perpetrator.

Think I'm exaggerating? Ask the people of Achanalt and Achnasheen, of various parts of rural Perthshire, and a host of other communities bulldozed by Scottish authorities with an unspoken agenda. Instances are readily available: go to the Windfarm Action Group (WAG) website for starters. It is the principle at work of the sol niger, the Dark Sun: nowhere are we so unconscious as in the centre of our own current universe (which we assume we know so well), be that our individual psychology or the goings-on in the world around us. It is easy to analyse history, far more difficult to see what is really happening now, right under our own nose.

A final point. John Lash states, at the beginning of Chapter Seventeen of 'Not In His Image', that 'Monotheism begins with a god who hates trees.' He just as easily say 'a god who hates mountains'. Here is the quote, from the Book of Deuteronomy in the (Un)holy Bible: 'Ye shall utterly destroy all the places where in the nations which ye shall possess served their gods, upon the high mountains, and upon the hills, and under every green tree....' This is the pathological psychological basis of the invasion of the windfarms, dreamed as it is by a bunch of dominators with unreconstructed monotheistic egos. Perpetrator mentalities, nature haters. I rest my case (for now). And I shall return to Glenfinnan, to its hills, its lochs, and its wild places.

Note: a careful look at the top picture shows smoke from a wildfire behind the hillside on the right, apparently started by some people camping and trying to burn their toilet paper after using it ....

Plastic Mountain

No no, this is the real thing..........

Any vestige of credibility I may still cling to in the eyes of my readers probably vanished on the mountain breeze when I wrote about the archons and alien intrusion on January 25th this year. To date, however, not one of even my most erudite friends and contacts has come up with an alternative solution to the most pressing of riddles posed in that article: why can humans be so fantastic, yet be driven so easily to behaviour that is imbecilic on the back of stupid ideas and beliefs? This being the case, and with nothing to lose, I have continued to look further into archon theory. The wider context for this project has been a close read of John Lamb Lash's magnificent book 'Not In His Image'. The result of John's painstaking and original research, the work is first and foremost a presentation of Gnostic theory and practice. According to John, Gnosticism is not, as normally supposed, an offshoot of early Christianity that hasn't fared well in the Darwinian stakes. Rather, it is the mystical repository of pagan and shamanic practices and ideas that stretch back some thousands of years.

As well as constituting a masterly exposition of Gnostic vision, 'Not In His Image' presents a detailed and thoroughgoing critique of the basis of Christianity and the other Abrahamic religions (Judaism and Islam). This is necessary, since the Gnostics viewed with alarm the development of the extremist cult that became early Christianity, with its weird beliefs in an off-planet creator-of-all god (known as the Demiurge), along with the doctrine of salvation for those who embraced the redemptive nature of the son of aforementioned god. 'Demented' is a word that John Lash uses to describe how the Gnostics viewed this sect with its bizarre ideas. These pagan mystics were to pay the price for their opposition to Christianity: they were vanquished and more-or-less disappeared without trace in the wake of the juggernaut of creator god worship (incidentally, some modern Christians retain this hostility to Gnosticism: watch 'Gnosticism Exposed' on youtube; though some of what is expressed here as Gnostic does not accord with John Lash's research).

This is the wider context; but to return to the archons...... The stupidity of so many human ideas and beliefs (which in turn drive idiotic and destructive actions) is rooted, according to the Gnostics, in the Demiurge's idle boasts and the actions of the archons, who lead us away from our true path in life. To understand the way in which this happens requires an acquaintance with Gnostic error theory. Put simply, this states that mistake-making is part and parcel of our life - to err is human -, and indeed it is through our mistakes that we learn. But through the deviant influence of the archons, we fail to detect our errors, which then magnify unchecked and out of all proportion. This is how demented ideas and belief systems arise and continue to propagate.

The archons' prime means of deception and leading us astray is HAL in Coptic: simulation. The idea needs a little getting used to - hold it in the mind without judgement for a while. But it is expressed succinctly in Chapter 17, 'The End of Patriarchy':

"In Gnostic terms the replication of nature in lifeless forms exemplifies HAL, Archontic simulation. In the shift from organic form to abstraction an entire range of values is lost and other values contrary to organic life are adopted as if they were equal, or even superior to, the lost values. This is antimimon, countermimicking."

On reading these few lines, I felt as if I had been struck be a thunderbolt. Not only were they relevant to the arising of the Abrahamic religions with their strange beliefs; they seemed to present a precise description of the madness of that part of the so-called environmental movement which is fixated on Anthropogenic Global Warming and the invasion of the windfarms. Adopting values contrary to organic life as if they are equal to them is exactly what Al Gore, Greenpeace, WWF, Scottish Renewables, and the rest have done. For the politicians, climate change paranoia has been a useful ploy in advancing their true and covert agenda of increased control over resources and human lives. For big business, it has been a convenient cover for reaping rich financial rewards while claiming that right is on their side. And for one-eyed environmentalists it has meant blind adherence to an ideology that ends up as species-hating and totalitarian. They have been truly suckered by the archons.

All have in common the fact that they live remote from direct experience of Sophia, the living intelligence of the Earth as expressed by the Gnostics. Instead, their notion of 'environment' is a simulacrum, composed of theory and ideology; of dodgy statistics, dodgier computer models, and targets plucked out of thin air. In general, it is feigning salvation of the Planet while damaging it. And there is a special irony involved in the dynamic of archontic effects on our environmentalists. It is our rich biosphere (our 'environment') which, say the Gnostics, the inorganic archons particularly envy. How cunning to turn humans against that very biosphere in the belief that they are acting to protect it!

The archontic influence, elegantly described as "subliminal effects that disguise themselves in the routine operations of mind and imagination" is also instrumental in the creation of what we sense as 'evil'. The subject of evil has preoccupied philosophers, theologians, and others throughout the ages; the Gnostic view is pragmatic and very simple. Evil is what arises when our mistakes are not attended to, and given a further deviant spin by the influence of the archons. Uncorrected error holds the potential to morph into what we sense as 'evil'. To my mind, it may well manifest as a kind of blind and wilful ignorance, driven by unacknowledged (archontic) influences in the psyche. I recently made the bold proposition that there is something evil about Al Gore and his ilk. This is the analysis that gives rise to this notion - the reader can fill in the gaps for her/himself.

The "preference for simulation over reality is the primary risk of deviation for the human species, the Gnostics warned". Just so. And while we have an 'environmentalism' that is spearheaded by those with unreconstructed egos defined by scientific materialism and shaped in the Judeo-Christian mould, we can expect little but deceit and deception from it.

Light of the World

And God created Man in His Own Image........

I recently returned from a trip to visit family members in Colombia, South America. There are quite a number of good things about Colombia. No windfarms, for a start. Close encounters with a scaly, light-blue iguana, and the oversized toads that come out in the evening. And there exists a certain vitality among many of the poorer people that seems generally lacking in their British counterparts. Without a benefits system to fall back on, the Zen saying 'No work, no food' becomes urgently relevant. Go to the indoor fruit and vegetable market at eight in the morning and you will witness a scene teeming with folk from the countryside around announcing their wares to all-comers: 'aguacate, aguacate, mango, guayaba' they shout, as if we didn't have eyes to see what's on display today. Reeling from the shock to the senses at such a time of day, you can try to wear it off with a quiet ride on the bus. Here, however, the 'ayudante' - literally, 'helper' -leans out of the door of the moving vehicle to shout out the destination to any likely customer on the street. This would all drive our local friendly EU health-and-safety tsars apoplectic, for sure. But that is part of their job: to suck the lifeblood out of the languorous European beast. A century ago, D.H. Lawrence was writing about Europe, and how old, tired, and stuck it had become. Imagine how much worse it is nowadays! The European soul continues to be worn down by softly softly totalitarianism, rendered compliant, complacent, sheeplike, and world-weary. A trip to a country like Colombia only serves to highlight this rudely.

Unfortunately, I was not the only person to be visiting Colombia at the time. My sojourn coincided with the jet-set arrival of none other than the Saviour of Humankind Himself, Mr. Al Gore ('Just call me the Messiah. I don't mind.'). He was there as part of his global mission to save us all from ourselves, particularly through the holy medium of carbon taxes. While the idea of carbon taxes is hard enough to take in Europe, it is doubly criminal in a country where half the population can barely feed and house itself. Sadly, Colombians have a special weakness for the saviour complex (Jesus Christ and former President Alvaro Uribe come readily to mind), and the current President indicated that he welcomes Salvador Gore's initiative. To put things bluntly: in poorer countries, the imposition of yet another tax would most likely lead to many unnecessary deaths through material deprivation. The doctrine of carbon taxes is a form of hatred of humanity in action. My own feeling is that Al Gore and his ilk have something evil about them (I choose this word carefully and deliberately, and intend to expand on its use in a future blog).

It has been suggested elsewhere that Warmism is indeed a new religion. To my knowledge, however, the striking similarities between the psychological profiles of Warmist theology and Judeo-Christian-Islamic salvationism have yet to be spelt out. Until now, that is....

It is my observation that modern Warmism replicates quite precisely much of the pathological psychology at the root of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic complex (a psychology that has resulted in a great deal of human misery and destruction of the face of the Earth during the last 2000 years). I shall attempt to briefly sketch a few of the salient features below.

First and foremost, both are pervaded by a strong sense of human inadequacy and sinfulness, with all the guilt and generally feeling rubbish about being alive that necessarily accompany this assessment of the human condition. The Genesis story involving a woman, a man, a serpent and an apple is well-known as the mythical source for Christianity. In Warmism, the feeling emanates from the notion that we are destroying the planet through our actions, which will lead to us all yelling and screaming before being swallowed up in a fiery hell. We are a plague on the face of the Earth, and should be ashamed at our existence in the first place. Put on the kettle and feel the guilt; catch a plane and face eternal damnation. The Judeo-Christian complex lying unchallenged in our breasts is thus transferred directly into environmental angst and sackcloth.

This 'plague on the face of the Earth' thinking is the source of the humanity-hating that is a feature of at least some 'environmental' writing and rhetoric. We are no good, we are sinners, we are destroying the planet, it would be better if we all just shot ourselves and disappeared. I know about this, because I felt similarly myself a few years ago. Looking at the stupidity and destructive effects of the human species, I could feel only despair that sometimes tipped over into rage. I no longer see things this way: I have deeper alchemic/shamanic experience, plus exposure to the minds of some more positive souls, to thank for this change of heart.

Then there is the Apocalypse. This is an integral feature of at least more fundamental forms of Christianity, and is a nightmare fantasy that has been readily hijacked by the so-called Environmental Movement. Catastrophic global warming visions of cities going underwater, of continents of ice and snow crashing into the oceans, could come straight from the pages of Revelations. And, as with the nightmare scenarios of the Bible, the effect of these visions is to terrify and terrorise the populace, thus rendering it ripe for manipulation. Following the lead of the Christian missionaries who went before them, the Warmist zealots recognise the value of getting people young. Indoctrination of young, open, pliable minds is best. This is stated quite explicitly in the blurb accompanying the 'fact sheets' produced by Hi-Energy (Highland and Islands Scotland) for primary schools: 'Engaging with young people on the subject of energy is vital if they are to drive this industry forward in years to come.' And, given that their 'fact sheets' assert the incontrovertible truth of catastrophic global warming, we know what sort of energy is being touted here. I read that lots of kids are getting stressed out by the global warming propaganda at school. This is all shameless missionary-style brainwashing.

Fear not, however, good people. Redemption is at hand. The Saviour is with us. NOW. His name, Al Gore: Messiah for our troubled times. I exaggerate not. Al Gore has taken on the mantle completely. He has incarnated to save us from our sins; and to save the polar bears too. In common with the Abrahamic religions, there is the notion of the Chosen People. Our sins can be absolved, forgiven. Just believe, cover your mountains with turbines and pay your carbon taxes, and ye shall be saved. Isn't that great? Actually, lest we forget: there is something else that both Christian and Warmist saviours have in common. They are both total frauds.

In reality, the Warmist zealots function within a framework of what Jungians call unconscious shadow projection. Christianity does the same, manifesting the Shadow in the form of the Devil, the Anti-Christ, pagans and other non-believers. In Warmism, the complex is transferred onto carbon (black as the Devil!), users of aeroplanes, and scum-of-the-earth deniers. The intolerance demonstrated towards non-believers marks out Warmists as the true inheritors of the mantle worn previously by Conquistadors, Inquisitors, and the like. Instead of being reasonable thinking people who are merely sceptical of the official creed, those who dare to ask questions are evil 'deniers', standing in the way of the one and only truth, irritating obstacles to total world domination by those who have seen the Light.

And, once more in common with their Abrahamic buddies, the Warmists claim to be saving the world while they are simultaneously creating misery and planetary damage. Think destruction of landscapes and habitats; wiping out rainforests and food-producing land for biofuels; brainwashing and terrorising the kids.

My point is this: the pathological religious complex which has come to dominate the western world over the past two thousand years has been hijacked by our modern (pseudo) environmentalists. It is a psychology that comes only too naturally to many of us, and transfers, effortlessly and complete with all its neuroses, onto environmentalism, thus rendering this pathological as well.

Dreamtime

It is now almost a year since the inception of Pale Green Vortex. In retrospect, this has been one of the more remarkable and fulfilling years of my life to date, and Pale Green Vortex manifests a fair description of much that has taken place. During a recent trawl through my posts of the last twelve months, and managing to set aside the false modesty that customarily plagues me (in truth a symptom of pride), I felt a quiet sense of satisfaction. The superficially disparate themes scattered throughout these pieces actually represent different facets of an emerging gestalt of total interconnectedness, apprehended most properly through the cultivation of multidimensional consciousness. Lots of long words, but the the simple nub of the matter.

In his final, and arguably finest, book, 'The Active Side of Infinity', Carlos Castaneda is told at one point by sorceror/teacher Don Juan Matus that, in order to become a true warrior-traveller, he must first thank those who have meant so much to him. In particular, Don Juan singles out two young women from Castaneda's past, and we follow our hapless protagonist as he searches high and low in an effort to find them in order to repay his indebtedness.

My own wish to say thanks has a less dramatic context, maybe, but is heartfelt all the same. I would like to thank all those wise and courageous ones, whose hearts, souls, words, and actions have been so vital to me over this last period. There may be others but, in addition to my personal friends, I would like particularly to say thanks to the following: Neil Kramer, John Lamb Lash of metahistory, Karen Sawyer of ARC, Opaque Lens of Shamanic Freedom Radio, Peter Taylor, and those who have blogged tirelessly against the creeping non-environmental totalitarianism of the emerging warmist/windfarm religion. A special mention is also due to Ralph Metzner, whose course in Alchemical Divination I attended two years ago in Switzerland turned out to be a gradual yet empowering initiation into the ways of energy and consciousness.

In the meantime, March has been pronounced Dreamtime in the Vortex; which is a fancy way of saying there will be no further posts this month. I imagine the universe will survive somehow. But we shall be back in April, for year two. Who knows where this will lead us.....?

Artwork: Aboriginal Dreamtime Sisters, Colleen Wallace

The Dangers of Psychedelic Substances, Part Two

It's morning on a clear but chilly day in March 1974. I'm sitting in the bedroom of a friend in Redland, Bristol, south-west England. He opens a drawer by his bedside, takes out a piece of off-white blotting paper, then hands it to me. I glance at this unappetising offering, before turning to look into my friend's eyes. Part of me is terrified: like everyone else, I have read and heard the numerous media reports, and wonder if I will be thrown into complete and irreversible madness. At the same time, I trust my friend, and so many people I know of in the underground culture, who recommend it as a kind of rite of passage. I put the blotting paper into my mouth; it is dry to the tongue, but tasteless. I swallow it down. Then we head off to the Mendip Hills to burn a cat.

The cat is already dead. It is the recently-deceased companion of the man from the flat below. This fellow, who sports a remarkable long moustache, claims to be a Zen master; I do not believe him. I dutifully collect wood for the funeral pyre, then watch as the cat's elements are returned to the wider universe in what increasingly seems like a pointless ceremony.

We return to the flat, where more commune-type people arrive. At one point, my Bristolian friend unnervingly sprouts long donkey's ears. I blink hard, then turn away to watch Gandhi on a large wall poster as he dances vigourously to the music.

The following morning we climb to the top of Glasonbury Tor. The dark green melancholic countryside stretches quietly in all directions beneath a uniform grey sky, mirroring precisely my mood. This first LSD trip has been a shattering experience - quite literally. All my ideas, ideals, and ideologies - and believe me, I had plenty - have been shown to be just that: thoughts and viewpoints, nothing more. I have been living my life from ideas about it and, for the first time - since I was a child, at least - I have experienced everything directly, the veils of thought and idea ripped asunder. My view of self has been smashed, leaving a nihilistic-tinged, everything's-the-same, is-ness. I survey Arthur's magic lands from a standpoint of slightly depressive freedom.....

February 1975: Almost a year has passed since the cat's cremation. Enough of my old idea-defined self has been shed to allow the embryo of a new sense of reality to emerge. It is Saturday evening, and I am sitting near the fire in the commune living room in Oxford. Slowly the contents of the room and of my mind rearrange themselves, until I find myself participating in a web of total harmony. I have never known such peace and tranquility before. A hitherto unsuspected sense of 'at-homeness' manifests itself within my being.

At this moment, a dark cloud of realisation drifts across my mind. The means to this state of utter harmony is not officially approved. It is, indeed, frowned upon and highly illegal. This is a most bizarre state of affairs - that the means to bliss and wisdom can lead to a hefty prison sentence. There is only one unavoidable conclusion: bliss and wisdom can play no part in the official agenda. And from this point I know - as I had known for many a year, but less vividly - that one part of me will always be like a bandit, an outlaw, wandering on the peripheries of sanctioned existence.

April arrives: high spring in Oxford. I take matters very seriously. With an instinctive grasp of what Leary and co. refer to as 'set and setting', I read Tibetan Buddhist texts before chemistry-facilitated journeys into the unknown - to the amusement, concern and, in one case, barely-concealed ridicule, of my fellow communards. 'Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects' by Alexandra David-Neal is a favourite. One Saturday afternoon I am sitting on my bed, when something miraculous seems to happen. In the Buddho/Hindu-tinged post-hippie speak of my diary entry for the day: 'I became one with the rest of the universe.......The 'I' dissolved totally into the rest of creation..... And the intuitive power, energy, of those few seconds was enormous, incredible..... it was all so simple, so obvious. Like it had always been like this.... And I don't know how long I'll remember, except that I'll probably never forget.....' And so it continues.

O.K. So it's all very well becoming one with the rest of the universe, and realising that's how things have always been anyway: but where do you go from there........?

Timothy Leary, self-proclaimed 1960s High Priest of acid, was by all accounts an extremely complex character. What is frequently overlooked, however, is the fact that he was initially - and arguably remained - first and foremost a psychologist. Years before he set eyes upon anything remotely psychedelic, he was working with friend and colleague Frank Barron at the Kaiser Clinic, California. Taking advantage of the backlog of patients awaiting psychotherapy, Leary and Barron devised a nifty little experiment aimed at demonstrating how useful therapy really was. They would compare the progress of those undergoing therapy with that of those waiting for it. The results of their research were surprising, to say the least: there was no difference between the two groups at all! In both, roughly one third of patients improved, one third remained the same, while a third deteriorated. The critical factor, Leary concluded, was not so much therapy, as what he referred to as the 'vitalizing transaction': that elusive 'click' which, as Barron described it, was 'as frail as love or blessedness, as passing as the moment of grace or the beginning of creation.' (quoted in 'Storming Heaven' by Jay Stevens, chapter 11). (As an aside, Leary and Barron's idea would help to explain why so many people spend years and a fortune in psychotherapy, without escaping from the web of family relationships in which they are trapped. Lots of understanding but no vitalizing transaction.). A few years down the road, Leary swallowed some psilocybin-containing mushrooms and proceeded to devolve to a single solitary cell, an experience so vitalising that it profoundly influenced the course of western youth culture for decades to come.

So where could you go from union with the godhead; from watching the universe create itself moment by moment in front of your own eyes; from experiencing time and space dissolve into irrelevance, or whatever other vitalizing transactions took place with a little help from the LSD blotter or tiny brown microdot? It is difficult to convey the impact of those few short periods, sometimes mere moments, when the world was seen with fresh eyes, as if for the first time, and in a profoundly new and different light. Nevertheless, this was the question that many people were forced to confront in the early 1970s in Britain. Nobody told you about this stuff at school. Television and radio were silent on the matter. The local priest would want you committed. Hinduism and Buddhism offered more hope, however, and groups based on their teachings were among the main beneficiaries of all the acid-facilitated visions of the time. Rajneeshis, sanyassins, Hare Krishna people, Divine Light premies were everywhere if you frequented the alternative scene. I worked for a while in a Black and Decker tools warehouse in Didcot, Oxfordshire, making money for the commune project I was part of. Half the temps there seemed to be premies, mainly good-looking girls in long flowing dresses. 'She deserves better than that,' quipped one of my co-workers about a particularly beautiful girl on the warehouse floor, referring to her premie status as well as her rather passive Divine Light boyfriend. I was not inclined to disagree.

The overall ambience of these groups was one of 'going beyond acid', and before long I too joined the ranks of the post-LSD set. Barely fifteen months after realising my irreconcilable unity with the rest of the universe, I was giving away my last few blue microdots to an astonished friend named French Paul. Each successive trip now seemed to land me in a slightly different corner of the landscape of the cosmos, and I needed a map to help find a way around. The search was on for my own 'next step'.

I went to a Sri Chinmoy meeting. The guru came with impeccable credentials: one of his devotees was John McLaughlin of the Mahavishnu Orchestra. The evening consisted largely of a film about athletics, however, resulting in my leaving non-plussed. And while some of the phenomenology of my LSD-assisted ventures was mirrored in various Hindu texts, I eventually opted for a Buddhist path. I felt that Buddhism presented a clearer road map through the murky swamps of samsara towards the lands of nirvanic bliss.

In retrospect, all this 'going beyond acid' mentality was infected with hubris. The Beatles had already done it in 1967: 'LSD can only get you so far' was the subtext for John, Paul, and George at least, when they went off to meditate with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a guru I viewed with deep suspicion even at the tender age of fourteen. Instead of 'going beyond' - especially in the idealistically renunciate spirit that I adopted -, it might have been better to create situations where a more regular spiritual life was adopted, but one which included the chance to investigate more directly what precisely was going on at the height of the acid trip. Put it this way: 'going beyond' a substance that, even in the most miniscule of quantities, could open the doorway to the Absolute. What's that about?

In fairness, most of us had no precedents to help us on our way. For the majority, little had changed since, fifteen years beforehand, Timothy Leary had written of his initial intensive experiments with psilocybin: 'We were on our own..... Western literature had almost no guides, no maps, no texts that even recognised the existence of altered states.' The western traditions that might have accommodated psychedelic experience - shamanic, alchemical, pagan - had been thoroughly destroyed by the monotheists, through inquisitions, witch-burnings, and the rest. What felt radically new in the 1960s and 1970s was, in fact, more like a fumbling attempt to reconnect with our own natural sacred traditions, our suppressed and persecuted birthright. Traditions within which, as in modern-day shamanic societies in Central and South America, and in West Africa, psychedelic, or entheogenic, experience is firmly embedded within a wider psycho-spiritual context and tradition. It is testament to the success of the Christians that I, along with many others, had to look far afield for traditions that said anything about altered states of reality that may be entered courtesy of psychedelics, or indeed other practices. And the ensuing love affair with organised religions born in the East brought with it, in turn, its own catalogue of problems and pitfalls.......

Highland Autumn

Well, they're a bit late. But, then, what's three months in eternity?

Jump Aboard the ARC!

February 19/20th 2011 sees the third ARC (Alternative Research Community) convention, once more to be held in Bath. Rather unfortunately, I shall not be there, but I attended the first two weekends, and cannot recommend them highly enough! Friendly atmosphere, stimulating people, well-presented talks from folk at the forefront of independent research into the things that the Guardian and BBC just don't want to know exist. And all hosted by the irrepressible Karen Sawyer.

There are probably not a lot of weekends in the course of a lifetime that can alter its trajectory, but a couple of days at the ARC convention can do just that. In my less modest moments, I like to think that Pale Green Vortex shares in the same spirit as the ARC conventions, that of 'looking outside the box' in the search for greater authenticity, greater understanding, and deeper meaning. Hey, who created the box anyway?!

My thanks and gratitude to those who have actively participated in these events. For any reader who has yet to experience their magic: get on down there!

website: arcconvention.org